Enfilade

AUGUST 08 03

enfilade – a number of things arranged as if threaded on a string: a series of rooms with the doors in line affording a continuous passage

I tend to want to give things up once I've got them going, feeling a tyranny of boredom, a constraint of self-imposed discipline. I wonder what is the worth of things, and shouldn't I be doing something else. If I'm in this mood, then I'll look for small things to latch upon as a 'sign' to completely discard it. There's a certain element of cutting off the nose to spite the face, but there you are, that's me. Sometimes I prefer the freedom of just not caring.

The top line of hexagram 33 has always been something I've responded to:

Cheerful retreat. Everything serves to further.

 

The situation is unequivocal. Inner detachment has become an established fact and we are at liberty to depart. When one sees the way ahead thus clearly, free of all doubt, a cheerful mood sets in, and one chooses what is right without further thought. Such a clear path ahead always leads to the good. (Wilhelm-Baynes translation)

I see this line as a release from an unwanted obligation.

On a discussion forum last night dedicated to Yijing matters I wrote a sentence, after coming in fairly drunk, that expressed something of how I was feeling not just in relation to the subject being discussed, but, it occurred to me after a hot restless night, in relation to many things:

I am like a ghost looking in on things that once mattered to me.

I have felt like this many times. Usually the mood changes with the passage of time and enthusiasm returns for pottering about in my life doing the things that supposedly interest me.

I have enjoyed success in many areas, I have achieved many of the goals I have set for myself. It's not that I look back on these things and the time spent on them as a waste, I can still 'objectively' realise that some of these things have been of great help to others and at the time some were experienced as utter triumphs by myself. I can remember all that. I also realise that some of these endeavours have enabled me to move on at a rate few are capable of. Many people of advanced years are still thinking the same thoughts they were in their teenage years, their view of the world has not substantially evolved and many simply no longer think much of any worth. By contrast, I have overturned my worldview many many times, bust it to pieces, placed myself in the void of the abyss, and not even bothered to pick up the pieces, just waited with my head in my hands until something comes along to instil a little change, and I follow that out of no more than an appreciation of its lightness and difference to the stultifying mental drudgery I have just destroyed, and in the process, my very essence of 'self'.

Yes, I would say I am a self-destructive person. I sabotage myself continually. Once I thought I might be, well not happy, but perhaps contented, which is a feeling I get from sensing I am in the right place at the right time doing the right thing, by living on my own in the mountains. I tried it for a while, and realised it was, for me at least, just another form of suicide, although there were moments of connection with a divine purpose that came to me and I probably returned from the wilderness changed by the experience. Even now, as I write these words, I sense a graceful presence attempting to soothe an undoubted welling anger and frustration within me. I am fully alive to the possibilities inhering in life, and stretch it way beyond to the reality of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, although this is not something I encourage myself to talk about as minds are still too closed about that. And only those who have not experienced it talk about it, making a mockery of it for those capable of a more serious expression, inclining the voices of experience to silence. And perhaps this is best.

If you were to ask me what do I most want, after my fleshbound desires were satiated and enduring love established, it would be to be shown the true meaning of experiences of extraterrestrial contact my mind cannot fully grasp, to be taken quite beyond this world now, since I sense I have stayed too long.

Their timescale is long, unutterably long. I couldn't begin to explain what it requires of you not to have your brain fried by such experiences, to retain a clear outlook and balance forces so powerful it is beyond human imagining. I became an intermediary, I know that much, a pathfinder into other realms, but it's been a lonely journey and redemptive experiences few and far between. I have had to learn how to dismiss my most powerful emotions and desires, I have been crushed by limitation and restrained 'for my own good'. I have not achieved all that I am capable of, weariness hangs upon me like a heavy overcoat.

I wanted to be a 'Man of Destiny' as a child. Now I am one, though I don't expect readers of this to truly understand why. But something is changing now, in me and in the world. I fully expect when it happens I will be overjoyed, but the world will be terrified. That kind of change. For me, it's nothing I haven't experienced already.

Then perhaps I will understand my role more fully, because I have been in this training school far longer than I expected. The 'training school' has been my psychic space, my place of being, my most minute personal details. I can't say that I don't fear breaking out of this phase completely, but I sense I am picking up the signs of change more dramatically now, and by that I mean still resident in small things, nothing that would be at all obvious to most people. How I feel is no longer the private experience of some human entity I give a name to for convenience, it is more like being a long-abandoned recording instrument on the surface of the Earth sending out data to an off-planet location, triggered by a pre-determined algorithm quite beyond my understanding.

I have lived my life according to crazy visions that may not be crazy. It has taken me this long to wonder whether there might be some other way. This would, of course, mean abandoning everything that has ever meant anything to me. I'm not sure that is even possible, but certainly many things that have meant a great deal to me no longer do, so perhaps it is happening anyway. It feels more like reaching a profound stage of whatever endeavour I have long been engaged on than it does a perfectly ordinary disillusionment. This much I think I recognise, and to that extent it perhaps tells me I'm not about to just drop the ball at this late stage. But I confess to feeling extraordinarily burdened by my perception of reality, such that I may have to heave it from my shoulders and throw it away. May my words be a record of a journey, and sorry if it got scary.

Sometimes you reach down deep inside of you and find only the crumbling dust of your heart in a parched desert, all sense of belonging passed away, was but a mirage anyway, and even the clamour of friends calling to you you turn your head away from, not wanting to look in their eyes and see them too collapse to dust. Of course you are lonely when no-one understands what the fuck you are talking about, when people have other concerns to you. These days it would require too much of another person who desired to get close to me, truly close, and even then it may not be something that many could hold and sustain. They would have to be drawn like a moth to the flame. The heat of my passion is like a furnace, but my passion confounds people rather than enlightens them. I am a cipher that needs to be cracked, otherwise you are dealing with appearance only. Some may grasp a straw from the hayrick fire, but of what use is that, too little too late. As the Yijing says in a comment on hexagram 30/4:

Matters end badly when a man spends himself too rapidly and consumes himself like a meteor.

But sometimes you just don't care. Some men are an island, and their shore is both far away and treacherous to land upon. And shapeshifting devils obscure the path should any make it there. Welcome to my world. Why would you want to come here, the journey I warn you is arduous, best turn away now. Or show me the sense of throwing all this away, because the journey to you you must realise requires that I destroy myself just to get close. Are you worth it? If so, come to me, come to me as if drawn by a magnetism that frightens you, pull yourself away from the crowd of the ordinary and let me show you what I have accrued, that means nothing to me without you. You would be surprised what kind of magic comes easily to me, that means nothing to me, that will burn you if you abuse it. Allow yourself to be drawn and forget your world, as I will forget mine.

There is nothing of convenience here, yet there is neither anything of deception, all is bare and open, all it requires is strength, inner strength, to make good the natural inclination to falter. And then it is no more, it is whatever we want it to be. But you cannot want anything of my world without giving up everything you think is your world. I am not preaching to the converted, I am addressing the brave. Come now, out of your hiding places, rise up and take hold, because soon it will be too late. Is this not what you wanted? What you've always yearned for? The moment is now, and it requires something of you. Put aside everything and follow this course, or else the wind will brush over the traces. My footsteps in the sand will transmogrify by sleight into your own footsteps going in circles. Follow my voice while you still hear it, do not wait until it is inaudible and indistinguishable from vultures, or you will lose your bearings in the sandstorm that is surely coming. Take heed of what perplexes you, then cast it away to find within a greater glory and stare up to the stars and say: 'I am ready.'

Do not mind the conflagration this will unleash, watch the meteor explode and say with your last breath of before: 'I was a part of that. That is my true status.' Then you will see the hidden prophet and know there is more spew where this came from.

My prayer is not to be needed, alas too little too late. I cannot even easily disregard the words as mere possession babble now, no, it is me who is saying this. I know, and the walls are closing in, the rafters of reality are tumbling down, though no-one sees it yet. Look, move before they fall, see their path before they hit you, but if you cannot do that then just lift up what seems too heavy to lift and emerge from the rubble of what was. That world is gone, the sunlight of the evening is peaceful. Listen now to the silence, and know it is done, though it is beyond you how it could possibly have happened. Think on it as a last benevolent trick of a dying magician if you will, and weep if you must.

*

A magpie hops along a roof. One for sorrow.

A butterfly flutters by the open window, but stays outside.

A face I recognise passes by in the street as I sit on my cushion on the floor, dazed.

The blind eye of a cat jumping up on the windowsill fixes me in its glare.

My mind is blank, what came has gone. A shade. This world beckons, through the simple hunger of the belly. I am lost in a world of waking dreams. I have chores to attend to, shaky on my feet.

Something has happened, yet all appears the same. I do not know what to check for difference, this is not the world that was, yet it resembles it perfectly. I am hyperaware, and apprehensive. Everything is ordinary, yet like a path that has come to a sudden end. I suspect the world of lingering, to ease a transition. My breathing is careful, perhaps laboured.

The reflection of my face in the mirror has an expression of perplexity.

A tomato tastes like a tomato.

After eating, I sleep for several hours as twilight passes into night, curled up on the floor. There are scraps of paper all over the floor, sentences I struggled to rise up out of sleep against the bends to scribble down before collapsing back down into the great tired deep. Sometimes I know what I am talking about, and then even I do not know. I suppose I push away my intent, push it down into sentences moulded to the shape of my thoughts, but my thoughts shapeshift and I lose sight myself of intention, it smears itself like blended paint until its edges become obscure and all that remains is the picture, and even that gnaws ceaselessly upon the canvas like acid, dissolving its support.

Copyright © 2003 Biroco